Spooker

by Dean Ing

  Swede heard, too. "Police work. Ninety percent of it's that way. And right now that's good news, Nell."

  She managed to get her bike into the big car without help, then glanced at her watch. "I've got a late class tonight and I can just make it, guys." To Gary: "Still intend to take the night shift out here? You'll have mosquitoes for company."

  "I figured on that. Can't be helped," he replied. "They waited till dark to dump me, and they might play it that way again. I've got to know."

  Her peck against his cheek came and went so quickly that he almost failed to take note of it. "I know you do. Which car?"

  "Leave the Polara right here," Swede urged. "Little neglect never hurt it. You mind the walk tomorrow, Kojak?"

  Gary claimed he didn't. After Jan got into the big car and gave Gary the keys, she locked herself in momentarily while the two men drove back toward the surveillance site. Swede helped Gary haul Jan's old mummy bag and a sackful of amenities from behind the seats: sandwiches, coffee flask, flashlight, repellent, a paperback by Abbie Hoffman entitled Steal This Book. Then, with a thumb-up gesture, the old man zoomed away while Gary hurriedly climbed through the fence. He had his Beretta and his plan. As the Datsun's engine note faded, he was thinking, If only I had a good camera with infrared film. . .

  14

  MAY 1994

  Ralph Guthrie was spooked. after failing to raise his cartel buddy, Chuck Lane, on Friday night, he'd tried again the next morning. Then, because Hermosillo hotheads like Pepe Luna didn't want to hear "I don't know" for an answer, he'd driven to Lane's place; see if he was hung over, see if his little Beemer was in its stall. The car was there, and squeezed ahead of it in the stall was that blazing-quick Kawasaki bike, but no amount of ringing Lane's doorbell got any reaction, and he wasn't about to pick the lock if Lane might be in there. Only when Guthrie walked around intending to toss pebbles against windows did he see the big pane shattered.

  The old credit card-unlatcher trick failed him, and he could hear someone moving around in the next apartment, but that broken window drove his curiosity up enough notches to bring his lockpicks into play. It seemed to take forever.

  Guthrie had already put his gloves on to wipe down the knob and the doorbell, and he was damned glad of it once he was safe inside. Maybe "safe" wasn't quite the word.

  Sure as shit, that living room had been very unsafe, very recently. Guthrie looked for bloodstains, Chuck's body, and a stash in that order, and did not find any of them. But Luna had said that Lane was holding a small bundle of cash for La Familia; quite small, in fact, for them. It might look a good deal larger to Lane. And if ol' Chuckie had bugged out with one cent of Hermosillo money, it was time for Ralph to downplay their friendship. Those bullet holes looked as if somebody on Luna's payroll had already taken an active dislike to Lane.

  Another question loomed suddenly. A series of slugs stitching their way across a room in a crowded apartment complex should have made a hell of a racket. Why hadn't he seen a strip of yellow plastic across Lane's front door? Maybe because the apartment was now bait left out by cops and the noises in that next apartment were from big flat feet waiting for the trap to spring. If so, Ralph Guthrie had sprung it, but would not know for certain until he opened that front door again, or even the kitchen door.

  Guthrie did not consider the fact that, if nobody is alarmed enough to call the police, they never arrive.

  He tiptoed into the back bedroom, cranked the window open, pulled its screen inside, and dropped fourteen feet, minus the four feet of hedge he fell into. It broke his fall, and his hide in several places, and eventually brought the police because a bright ten-year-old saw him coming out of that window and had always longed for a reason to dial 911.

  So Guthrie had an interesting story to tell Saturday evening, but nobody to tell it to because dopers enjoy spending money, and instead of answering his pager, Pepe Luna was showering some of it around a private club that specialized in salsa music, but not in Anglo members. By Sunday morning there were plenty of yellow plastic streamers around Lane's apartment, and around his BMW and bike as well. Guthrie wore his Sunday sport coat and a tie to stroll through the area, feeling watched, but learned little more for his trouble.

  On Monday, Guthrie was summoned by phone to the creek-side strip of Applegate Park in central Merced. When Guthrie arrived, a familiar black Lincoln slummed in a nearby parking space. Pepe Luna sat on a picnic bench getting his satin shirt dusty with powdered sugar as he swigged coffee from a big cardboard cup and scarfed pan duke, a Latino equivalent of doughnuts. It was his broken knuckles that made Luna so maladroit; both of his hands looked as if they had, at one time or another, taken the worst of an argument with a boot heel. Though not much taller or wider than Guthrie, Luna positively towered over the pair of his wizened soldiers who sat by the boom box, wearing western boots and identical black jeans, snapping their fingers to music that was not quite too loud. Ralph Guthrie never got used to those slithery little wetbacks; seldom speaking, eyes always searching except to stare, evidently from the same clutch of snake eggs, straight long black hair with enough oil to lube the Luv. They were about the size of coral snakes, and roughly as much fun to deal with.

  Not that Luna was any great joy. He listened to Guthrie's account quietly, stopping him only to ask a few questions in the soft, graceful accent of the Latino. From Pepe Luna that accent said, We are a gentle people. Even our knives slide in gently.

  When Guthrie had finished, Luna thought it over awhile. Then he said, "I can learn what the local police know. Do you think your friend Lane has taken our money?"

  "Hey, not my friend," Guthrie protested, his hands rising quickly enough to arrest the gaze of the snakes.

  "It might depend on how much there was, Pepe - Mr. Luna."

  A judicious nod. "Have you received any warnings or even friendly contacts from - other businessmen?

  Bikers? Blacks wearing gang colors? Has he, you think?"

  Somehow it had never occurred to Guthrie that drug turf wars against La Familia might explode in a town like Merced. "They'd have to be nuts."

  "Some of them are. My question," Luna reminded gently.

  "No, never; hell, I'd have come straight to you! Can't speak for Lane," Guthrie replied.

  "Then find him, so that he can speak to us for himself. And do not let him know you have found him.

  Just contact me immediately; we will take it from there."

  "If I ever see him again. Jeez, he's prob'ly still running." Guthrie punctuated his little joke by moving his forefinger, jabbing it as he made sound effects: "Puh-puh-puh-puh-puh."

  Luna did not smile. "Make it your job to see him again. Visit every place he frequents. Keep an eye on his car. I will tell you what I learn to speed the process, but this is el estilo de, um, a tactic I have seen before. Frighten the little soldier into surrendering to another chief. But, deny it all you will, Chuck Lane was your friend. You brought him to me. Find him. You have one week."

  "Jesus Christ! I don't know where to start. I've already stuck my neck out a mile, going into his apartment for you, I got Band-Aids all over from a sticker bush. A week?"

  "If your Mr. Lane becomes an embarrassment to me, and you do not find him, Band-Aids will not cover your problems," said Pepe Luna. "You may use a thousand for expenses. I cannot be more fair than that."

  You got some rough notions about what's fair, you spic bastard, but I knew that coming in. "I'll do my best,"

  Guthrie said. "It'd help if I had a photo of Lane, but - " His shrug was helpless.

  "You can describe him well enough. Aaah," Luna went on, disgusted; "I suppose it would help. Very well, I will supply a photo." Without turning, he uttered a rapid burst in Spanish.

  "Si, patron," said one of the snakes.

  "He will deliver it to you at the bar - you know which one," Luna said to Guthrie. "Seven tonight. You may go," he added.

  Guthrie wanted to back away, but he squared his shoulders and made himself g
rin as he walked back to the Luv, thinking hard. He would begin by checking hospitals, something he should have thought of before.

  And he knew several bars to try; he would make a pass twice a day to check on the bike, which Luna hadn't even mentioned, and the BMW. If Chuck Lane could do something stupid over a small bundle of cash, he'd probably take just as many chances to retrieve that sweet little set of wheels, cop warnings or no cop warnings.

  It would be essential for him to keep in close touch with Luna to see what the spies turned up. If nothing broke for him in the next six days, maybe it would be time to move on without prior notice. Oakland or Denver might be nice.

  But he might never again sit astride a money pipeline the way he did with Luna's outfit, and there was still a chance he could raise Lane. Even if there wasn't, somebody on Luna's payroll would probably be watching to see whether Ralph Guthrie was really beating the bushes, so he'd beat them.

  Anything else? Not Candlestick Park - that would be one chance in a billion. Local sports events, dirt-track racing? Bike shops? Yeah, all definite possibilities. And then a submerged memory surfaced in his mind to pop its contents like a bubble: there was that receipt he had noticed, just a glance that prompted an instant of unspoken curiosity, when Lane was replacing a lever on his Kawasaki. The cycle shop that had sold that lever was not in Merced, but fifty miles away. In Fresno.

  15

  MAY 1994

  The San Diego Center of the DEA is one of only a dozen Division offices, and its secure lines to the local Fresno office stayed warm on Monday. Paul Visconti, in Fresno, had needed very little time to verify that Merced police had found Chuck Lane's apartment violated not once, but twice, in entirely different ways. Visconti's guess was that their Hermosillo connection in Merced had gone balls-up, but someone with a soft spot for agent Gary Landis had tipped him off in a way that would screw all parties, including DEA. Whoever it was had used Paul's name. Visconti had weathered serious leaks before, but this one had almost been fatal.

  To make it worse, Visconti admitted to himself that he was monumentally pissed at Landis for entertaining a charge of treachery from above, giving credence to a tip from an anonymous source. A few rounds through your living-room window could make a believer out of anybody, a small voice responded in his head. How calm would I have been in those circumstances? He covered Gary Landis's butt for officialdom, cursing under his breath as he did it, and began a computer search to discover which drug-connected hit teams employed women - or men passing as women. He knew that Israelis, Palestinians, and the IRA had all done it. Their connections to Hermosillo's La Familia, if any, were unknown. The Cali cartel was rumored to use a female courier named Nunez-Moncada, but the woman was not considered violent. More likely this was a new wrinkle initiated by the Mexican dopers by themselves. It's never been their MO. Perhaps they're getting more sophisticated, he thought. He stayed late at the office that evening, telling himself it wasn't because he hoped for another call from the absent Landis.

  On Tuesday Visconti drove to Merced wearing an ill-fitting old suit, heavy brogans, and no tie. In company of a detective and with all the plainclothes cops who'd seen that apartment in the past few days, he would pass to an outsider as another of the local brigade. Gary's neighbors had been canvassed; the time of the gunfire on Friday and the second-story man's defenestration on Saturday added more questions and no answers. Visconti learned precious little beyond a strong gut feeling that an extra faction was at work here.

  When faced with knotty riddles, Paul Visconti tended to abstract the problem, to make it fit a more general case. This kind of intellectual chess had sometimes helped untangle a case. Just as often, it simply stole his time. Driving back to Fresno, he played his mental game and, from some forgotten source text, borrowed the notion of two factions. One faction, with a penchant for direct action, wanted Gary Landis dead. They had shot at him, kidnapped him, even tried to dispose of the body. Both times they had failed, suggesting a streak of incompetence combined with a violent nature. For that we can substitute La Familia, but a lot of others as well. Too early for such substitutions - what's next?

  The other faction was friendly enough to Gary - or perhaps to the law enforcement he represented - to give him a sporting chance. They knew Visconti's name. So they had lied, warning Landis about his supervisor. Someone who can operate out of the usual loops, an agent of change, of chaos. So we've got the direct action group and the agents of chaos, and a given individual might be a member of both groups. Visconti grunted to himself in irritation. So far, chaos seemed to be winning.

  In his mind's eye, Visconti was gazing at pictures of Ralph Guthrie in the case file. Too early for that, I said, he warned his inductive side. But at least one side of Paul Visconti thought it knew who had warned his street agent.

  On Wednesday, his mail included a bulky manila envelope with plenty of packing. He had it opened remotely and the receptionist flinched when his "Good Christ!" rebounded from the glass front of her cubicle. McMilligan and another agent appeared at his side in moments. Paul Visconti was not the kind of man to exclaim at trifles.

  They handled the human jawbone carefully inside its Baggie, temporarily ignoring the sealed bottle and the sheets of cheap typing paper covered with the cursive scrawl of Gary Landis. This was no recent victim, they agreed; probably dead for years.

  "Not a lot of wear on the molars," McMilligan noted. "Very young, I'd say."

  "Male," Visconti said, "judging from the pronounced angle of the jaw. But I could be wrong. Okay, this is what we were waiting for. Looks like priority work for Forensics. Don, you take care of packaging while I read this; save a little time."

  In another hour they were less upbeat because by then, Visconti thought, he had read enough particulars to locate that mine shaft north of Clovis. And that meant overtime. By nightfall they'd found the place, contacted the Fresno County Sheriff's people, and identified the property owner starting with plat maps.

  In a case like this, with the Feds claiming priority and willing to commit their resources, a county sheriff was smart to waive most of the responsibility, and Fresno County's sheriff was not dumb. He did, however, take time to make a personal visit to the site. "I guess we'll be clearing up an old missing-persons squawk pretty soon," he said, speaking over the distant rattle of an engine-driven water pump. Fifty feet distant, a big hose from the shaft spewed water, which spilled through wire mesh before trickling into the soil.

  "Two," said Agent McMilligan, holding the big spotlight for him as they peered into the sloping shaft.

  "Could be more."

  The sheriff squinted harder. "How can you tell?"

  "'Cause I went down there with a damn rope around my waist to put that suction hose in place. And where the slope flattens out, farther in the hole just beyond where we can see from here, there's another body."

  "Floater?"

  "Has that transparent look," McMilligan said, "but this one hasn't been floating for a long, long time."

  16

  MAY 1994

  After spending Monday night in a mummy bag without result, waiting to verify his worst suspicions, Gary returned to Bakersfield. And every time he recalled the patient tone in the voice of Paul Visconti, he felt more and more like a thoroughgoing asshole. Still, he knew it would take time for a competent forensics rundown on the package he'd sent, and he refused to risk another call until he could verify that Visconti really was doing what an agent-in-charge should be doing. On Thursday he drove alone to the little town of Fillmore and made that call.

  It was too soon for a pathology report on the jawbone, Visconti told him; or the urine sample either.

  "We only got your evidence yesterday, Landis; give 'em a break. We've already put out an alert on Chuck Lane's driver's license and credit cards. I'll tell you this: if anyone in the system thought you'd gone berserk, they don't think so anymore. We found your mine shaft yesterday, and you were wrong; there were two bodies down there before you, not
one."

  "No idea who, I suppose," Gary mused.

  "Not the bones; we think it was a young male. Just got a confirmation on the other one, though, from prints."

  Gary's paranoia flared. "How do you get prints off a skeleton?"

  "You don't, but evidently the water level fluctuates in that shaft from year to year. Some time after the youngster was dumped - long enough for the body to decay fully - another adult male was dropped down there, probably while the water level was higher. When the water receded again, it took the second body a little way down slope with it. Since the water's cold down there - "

  "Tell me about it," Gary growled.

  "Well, it was a break for us. You know about adipocere tissue?"

  Gary paused to make the connection. Adipocere was a transformation of soft body tissues into something between fat and soap, formed over a long period of time in cold, wet surroundings. It made a ghastly sight, but adipocere had been known to preserve evidence for years. "You're saying you've got a complete corpse," he said at last.

  "Complete enough for prints."

  "Whose?"

  "That's a real eye-opener, and you can just get your ass back here and find out for yourself. I'm not going to cover for you forever, Gary."

  A sudden tightening of his throat made Gary's voice husky. Goddammit, what's wrong with me? "I want to, Paul. I'd - okay, just one more favor. Who else could I call, just so I'll know this whole business is fully in the system and - you know."

  "I know, you suspicious bastard." After a low, mirthless laugh, Visconti told him to call the group supervisor in the San Diego office. "Or, if you want to look like a putz, call the SAC and tell him you still suspect me. They both know you're running hurt; they just don't know you're running loose from me like this. That wouldn't look good on your record. You getting the picture?"

  "In full color, with instant replay."

  "So quit jerking us off; McMilligan could use some help," Visconti said, none too kindly, before he broke the connection.